Yahoo Inc beat Wall Street’s profit and sales expectations as spending by advertisers showed signs of life in the third quarter and as months of cost-cutting and restructuring boosted the Internet company’s bottom line.
Shares of Yahoo, the top US seller of online display ads but a distant No. 2 to Google Inc in search, jumped 5 percent after the results, which analysts said boded well for the fourth quarter, when ad spending should improve further.
Yahoo’s revenue from display advertising was much better than expected, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler, citing the 2 percent sequential increase in US display ad sales.
“That basically says that large Fortune 500 advertisers who want high-quality, premium inventory are going back to Yahoo more in the third quarter than they were in the first or second,” he said.
Yahoo’s net profit more than tripled year-on-year, though a big chunk of the upside came from the sale of its stake in Chinese Web site Alibaba.com (阿里巴巴).
Yahoo has undergone significant restructuring since chief executive Carol Bartz took over in January. It said in April it would lay off 5 percent of its workforce, or about 675 jobs, and it also pulled the plug on underperforming properties.
Yahoo also signed a 10-year Web search partnership with Microsoft Corp to challenge Google, a pact that US and European antitrust regulators are evaluating.
Chief financial officer Tim Morse said on a conference call that the company still believes the deal would close early next year and that they can make significant progress on integration in one or two major markets next year.
Morse said large advertisers began to spend again in the third quarter.
“I’m not going to predict when the growth rebounds, but I feel good that things are no longer on the downward trend,” he said.
Excluding traffic acquisition costs that Yahoo shares with partners, net revenue was US$1.13 billion in the third quarter, close to the average analyst forecast of US$1.12 billion.
That compared with net revenue of US$1.14 billion in the June quarter and US$1.33 billion in the year-earlier period.
Some analysts said the improvement that Yahoo experienced was a reflection of a brightening overall economic climate as much as anything else.
“Most of the benefit that they are seeing is because the economy is improving — a rising tide — not because of all the changes they’ve made,” JMP Securities analyst Sameet Sinha said.
Net income was US$187.8 million, or US$0.13 a share, in the third quarter, up from US$54.3 million, or US$0.04 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts were looking for US$0.07 per share, Thomson Reuters said.
MORE VISITORS: The Tourism Administration said that it is seeing positive prospects in its efforts to expand the tourism market in North America and Europe Taiwan has been ranked as the cheapest place in the world to travel to this year, based on a list recommended by NerdWallet. The San Francisco-based personal finance company said that Taiwan topped the list of 16 nations it chose for budget travelers because US tourists do not need visas and travelers can easily have a good meal for less than US$10. A bus ride in Taipei costs just under US$0.50, while subway rides start at US$0.60, the firm said, adding that public transportation in Taiwan is easy to navigate. The firm also called Taiwan a “food lover’s paradise,” citing inexpensive breakfast stalls
TRADE: A mandatory declaration of origin for manufactured goods bound for the US is to take effect on May 7 to block China from exploiting Taiwan’s trade channels All products manufactured in Taiwan and exported to the US must include a signed declaration of origin starting on May 7, the Bureau of Foreign Trade announced yesterday. US President Donald Trump on April 2 imposed a 32 percent tariff on imports from Taiwan, but one week later announced a 90-day pause on its implementation. However, a universal 10 percent tariff was immediately applied to most imports from around the world. On April 12, the Trump administration further exempted computers, smartphones and semiconductors from the new tariffs. In response, President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration has introduced a series of countermeasures to support affected
CROSS-STRAIT: The vast majority of Taiwanese support maintaining the ‘status quo,’ while concern is rising about Beijing’s influence operations More than eight out of 10 Taiwanese reject Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework for cross-strait relations, according to a survey released by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Thursday. The MAC’s latest quarterly survey found that 84.4 percent of respondents opposed Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formula for handling cross-strait relations — a figure consistent with past polling. Over the past three years, opposition to the framework has remained high, ranging from a low of 83.6 percent in April 2023 to a peak of 89.6 percent in April last year. In the most recent poll, 82.5 percent also rejected China’s
PLUGGING HOLES: The amendments would bring the legislation in line with systems found in other countries such as Japan and the US, Legislator Chen Kuan-ting said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) has proposed amending national security legislation amid a spate of espionage cases. Potential gaps in security vetting procedures for personnel with access to sensitive information prompted him to propose the amendments, which would introduce changes to Article 14 of the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法), Chen said yesterday. The proposal, which aims to enhance interagency vetting procedures and reduce the risk of classified information leaks, would establish a comprehensive security clearance system in Taiwan, he said. The amendment would require character and loyalty checks for civil servants and intelligence personnel prior to
RSS